Building Your SMS List for the Holidays [2023]

The holiday season is a time of joy, celebration… and increased consumer spending. (To be exact, $936.3 billion in total spending in 2022, according to the NRF.)

Which means it’s also a time when businesses have a unique opportunity to connect with their customers and boost sales.

And one powerful tool that savvy businesses are harnessing during this festive time of year is SMS marketing.

But… how can you get a list of people to text?

In other words, how can you use the opportunities presented by the holidays to build your SMS list?

It’s a great question!

After all, if you have no list of subscribers for your texts, then there’s no point in trying to use SMS.

This article is here to help! We’ll walk you through how you can build your SMS list so that you can take advantage of SMS marketing for the holidays—and have the most successful holiday season yet.

So here are 5 strategies you can implement to grow your SMS list for the holidays.

5 Strategies for Building Your SMS List for the Holidays

Strategy 1: Showcase Black Friday as an Incentive

Everybody knows about Black Friday—and everyone expects great discounts.

AND no one wants to miss out.

In light of all of those observations, Black Friday can be an excellent incentive to get people to sign up for your texts. Let them know that they can subscribe to your texts in order to receive can’t-miss Black Friday deals.

Since Black Friday only comes once a year, this incentive has the added bonus of having a built-in time sensitivity, so that’s another plus.

Strategy 2: Create Valuable Holiday-Themed Content

Ideally, you know what your customer base wants and the kinds of topics they’re interested in.

Therefore, you can create free valuable holiday-themed content that intrigues their interest and helps satisfy their curiosity or meet a need.

You can then use SMS as a means for them to access more content, or as a means to get notified when new content comes in.

Strategy 3: Offer a Holiday Discount

Create a special holiday discount that will only be available to people once they sign up for your texts.

You can even have it set up so that people receive a confirmation message back automatically with the promo code or with instructions to redeem the offer.

This is a super easy and potentially beneficial way to incentivize people because the incentive isn’t hard to implement on your end, it’s somewhat time-sensitive (because it’s holiday-related), and it gives people an immediate benefit.

Strategy 4: Use Holiday-Themed Pop-Ups

As annoying as pop-ups can sometimes be, there’s a reason businesses use them.

It’s because they can be very effective!

The holiday season provides an opportunity to use a pop-up that is holiday-themed, which will feel more relevant at this time of year than a random pop-up showing up at other times.

Strategy 5: Use All the Opt-In Tools at Your Disposal

Your SMS platform comes with several opt-in tools, and it’s likely that you’re not fully utilizing all of them to help build your SMS list:

• Importing any current lists you have
• Opt-in keywords
• Customizable web sign-up form
• Automatically-generated QR codes
• Customizable web banner
• Integrations with your other services

Select 2–3 of these tools that you’re not fully taking advantage of and see if you can brainstorm some ways that you might be able to use them to help build your SMS list for the holidays.

These Strategies Can Help You Maximize the Season

The holidays are full of so much opportunity—you’d hate for that all to go to waste!

SMS can help you connect with your customers and prospects more effectively over the holidays. You just need a list of people to reach.

Each of these strategies can help get you there. We challenge you to implement at least one of these strategies this holiday season and see what a difference SMS can make in your holiday marketing.

What Now?

Your next step is to select at least one of the above strategies to try. Then get together with your marketing team and figure out the best ways to move forward with that strategy for your business.

Want any help figuring out how to implement them? You can book a free consultation here and our team of SMS experts would be happy to help!

Merry texting!